I had long wanted a tattoo with the text of one of Wallace Stevens'
poems, but I worried that a text tattoo wouldn't hold up well over
time. If the writing was large enough to stay legible as the image
inevitably blurred over the years, an entire poem would cover more
skin than I wanted to dedicate to the project. Over the course of a
few years, I wrestled with this dilemma, while getting other tattoos.
My fourth tattoo made reference to the Stevens
poem "The Glass of Water", and had a couple other allusions to his
work, but I wasn't satisfied.

For my fifth piece, I came up with the theme "Man the Tool User". I
wanted two tattoos on my forearms, one representing physical tools,
the other, language, the most important "tool". I decided on a wrench
and some gears for the "physical" tattoo, while the "language" piece
seemed like the perfect venue for the long-desired Wallace Stevens
tattoo. Text alone didn't capture what I wanted, so after much
thought I hit on the combination of a pen and writing. I had seen
some collectible fountain pens which were quite beautiful, and since
Stevens used a fountain pen, this seemed like a good choice.

Choosing the text was difficult, since Stevens has a large body of
work. After much hand-wringing I settled on three lines from
"Credences of Summer", one of his longish later poems, and a favorite
of mine:

Let's see the very thing, and nothing else
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight
Burn everything not part of it to ash.

I picked these lines not so much for their particular meaning or
resonance, but because they can stand on their own, and still capture
what I find most appealing in Steven's work: the rhythm and cadences,
the willfull obscurity, the insistent and slightly surreal images.

Well, that, and because they sound vaguely stirring and heroic, in the
tradition of "death before dishonor" soldier tattoos. Of course, this
is largely undone if you read the next five lines of the poem -- my
excerpt is part of the set-up for a sort of joke about the
inescapability of metaphor. But I don't have to tell people that when
they're reading my arm...

I originally had a grand concept for the text; something like: "The
pen is writing, and as the ink dries, the letters become less physical
and more metaphysical." I imagined that the first letters of the
first line of text would be brightly colored, perhaps abstract, or
blurred, or some such thing. The closer you got to the nib of the
pen, the more black and solid the letters.

I bought a book on collectible fountain pens, and took it to the
tattoo artist, along with the three lines of the poem. We discussed
my idea for the piece, and made an appointment for a month or so later
to do the work. Unfortunately, I'm not an artist, and I couldn't find
the right way to communicate my vision to the tattoo artist.

When I arrived to get the work done, the artist showed me the drawing
he'd made. It was black and white, so the concept of the changing ink
wasn't clear, but he said that was part of the coloring. He told me
that he had a very difficult time with the text. He no longer used
cursive writing, so he had to get his wife to write out the letters.
He used the various writing samples throughout the fountain pen book
as a guide to make the text look like it was written with a nib.
Still not satisfied, he enlarged the image to double size, corrected
the letter shapes further, then scaled it back down for transfer to my
arm. I'd pointed out several pens that I liked, and his image was a
composite of two of them.

My grand concept for the text ended up as a gradual left to right fade
from black to purple evenly across all three lines. I wasn't
overjoyed with that aspect, but the pen came out so beautiful that I
didn't really care. After living with the piece for a couple months,
I'd changed my mind. Almost everyone who looked at it said "the
writing is fading". So I went back to the artist, and he inked all
the letters black.

In hindsight, my idea was impractical for three lines of text, but
could have worked with one line. In any case, I'm quite happy with
what I have, since the words are more important to me than the whole
"metaphysical" concept was.